Glossary

Terms that might be helpful to know:

Third Culture Kid (TCK): A kid who spends a significant amount of time in a culture outside his or her parent’s identified culture. (ex. an American teenager who moves to Uganda for a year because his parents are in the Peace Corps or a Korean girl who is raised in Vietnam because her parents are missionaries).

Missionary Kid (MK): a kid whose parents are missionaries. Missionaries are individuals who typically (but not always) travel to a different area or country to share their beliefs/religion with another people group. Most missionaries are Christians who choose to live in a foreign country so that they can share the Gospel of Christ with others. Missionary Kids may live with the parents or at a boarding school, so they typically have the Third Culture experience.

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Home Culture: This is the individual’s passport country… or for children, it’s the parent’s passport country. I was born in Thailand, but my “home culture” has always been America because that’s what is on my passport. This term does not refer to how a person feels about the culture… it’s just reports what the documents report.

Host Culture: The culture where an individual is currently living, despite what your passport says. Thailand was my host culture while living in Thailand, but now America is my host culture because I am living in America.